Western Short StoryRodeo FoolJohn R. Phillips

Western Short Story

Big Jim Farnol leaned his hundred
and ninety pounds of bronc-toughened sinew slightly forward. His
fists knotted at his sides. The lines around his wide mouth were cut
deep, and there was a cold, hard anger that set lights flickering in
his blue eyes.

Standing where he was, he couldn’t
have helped hearing the voices of the men on the other side of the
empty mounting-chute in the Jackson Hole rodeo park. It was dark, but
he didn’t need light to know who those men were—one of them,
anyway.

“Pierce, there’s goin’ to be
hell to pay if Farnol finds out his girl is playin’ him for a fool.
I tell you—”

It took Jim a minute to identify
that voice as belonging to Whitey Long, a roper. But it was the other
voice that made the fires of anger and bitterness lick out in
Farnol’s brain.

“Think so, Whitey? Well, Eloise
will do what I tell her to, understand? It’s me she wants, not Jim.
If I say, ‘Break Jim Farnol,’ then she’ll break him,
understand?”

Jim heard Pierce Lambrech laugh, low
and taunting. Something snapped in Jim’s mind, and he began to move
silently to where the two men were standing.

Jim had made Pierce Lambrech what he
was in the shows. When Lambrech had been barred for doping a horse,
it had been Big Jim Farnol who had fought Pierce’s case with the
rodeo association and won him another chance. But he knew now
Lambrech would never be anything but a glory buster.

“We didn’t really need the girl
here at Jackson,” Lambrech went on. “But we may down at the War
Bonnet. We’ll make a killing there. We can get two to one odds on B
Fighting Western 2 Farnol, and we’ll have enough on hand to take
them. How much did Steymer collect here?”

Whitey’s voice was a whine,
“Around five thousand I reckon it was. Well split it four ways, and
that’ll leave—”

Jim could see the two men then. He
caught the glitter of a knife in Whitey’s hand when Whitey sprang
at Lambrech. Lambrech stepped back. His hand dropped to his side. His
gun was sliding from the holster when Jim threw himself at the two
men.

Lambrech heard him coming. He
whirled, and Jim could see the gun racing up. Whitey must have seen
turn at the same time, because he made a dive for the shelter of the
mounting chute.

Jim knew that he couldn’t reach
Lambrech before the gun blasted. He had been crazy to force the play
then, but Big Jim Farnol had always been a man who did his acting
first and his thinking later. He was still a dozen feet from Lambrech
when the gun leveled.

A lot can pass through a man’s
head while he is looking into the muzzle of a six gun. Jim thought of
Eloise Mason and his boot heels dug into the dust of the rodeo
grounds.

Jim had been with the shows since he
was seventeen, and he was twenty-six now. He had seen rodeo girls,
lots of them, girls who had the dust and the noise and the excitement
that went with the shows in their blood, the same as the men, and
they had never bothered him. Not until he met Eloise Mason.

At first it was her riding that
attracted him. She was a trick rider, and she attempted stunts that
most men would have avoided.

After that, he supposed it was her
eyes that made him notice her. They were hazel, with a half eager,
half wistful look about them. They went with her slender face, and
boyish yet feminine figure, but they did not go with a rodeo girl.
She didn’t belong with the shows, not then anyway, and she knew it.

She hadn’t the underlying
hardness. Her nature hadn’t been made brittle yet. But that would
come, and Big Jim Farnol had been afraid of it.

He couldn’t have said when they
first began planning for a ranch back in the Blue Mountains of
Oregon. It had been a year, anyway, and the ranch was no closer.

Now Eloise was mixed up with Pierce
Lambrech at framing shows! A red cloud of hatred settled over Jim’s
mind and blotted out everything but what he had just learned.

Lambrech stepped back, thumbing the
hammer. Jim’s boot heels bit into the earth. He couldn’t reach
Lambrech before the first bullet tore him back, but the weight of his
body would carry him on.

He had but one thought. To get those
calloused hands of his at Lambrech’s throat and choke the life from
the glory buster. Jim heard a girl’s voice behind him. It was low,
but there were undertones in it that cut into his mind.

“Pierce, don’t pull that
trigger.”

It seemed funny to Jim that his one
thought then was that most girls would have screamed, but Eloise had
courage in her slender, softly curved body.

Lambrech jerked to one side. His
face, usually a little pale and good looking, wasn’t good looking
then. It was twisted in a snarl, like a trapped weasel.

Lambrech hesitated a moment, and
that moment was long enough for Jim to reach him. Big Jim Farnol’s
iron fingers closed over the wrist that held the gun.

Jim’s left fist came out in a blow
straight from his shoulder that lifted Lambrech from his feet and
sprawled him back. Lambrech came up like a cat, and Jim was waiting
for him.

There was a killing fury behind
Jim’s fist that lashed into Lambrech’s soft face. He had one
thought—to finish the man quickly.

Lambrech went down again, and Jim
grabbed for him. He felt the girl’s hands on his arms, pulling him
back.

He turned to face her. Her eyes
seemed unnaturally large and the Wyoming moonlight made her look
pale. But there was no weakness in her. The fingers on Jim’s arms
dug into his flesh, as Eloise put all her strength against his to
keep him from reaching Lambrech.

“Jim,” her voice was pleading.
“Let him go.”

“Let him go so that you can marry
him, eh?” Jim panted. “Let him go so that you can help spend the
money he’s made fixing shows, eh? Damn him—”

“Jim.”

“Yeh,” he rasped. “I got the
play. The crowd bets on me because they know I’ll give them a
square ride. Well, the last two shows I lost out. Up at Billings, it
was a horse shot so full of dope he couldn’t buck. Down here it was
a busted latigo. If those tricks don’t work, that’s where you
come in, eh?”

“Jim,” she blazed, “if you
think that—if you think I’d do that—”

He put his hands on her shoulders
and pushed her back. Love is a funny thing. Sometimes it can make all
of the latent brute that there is in any man come to the surface.
Jim’s wide, prematurely battered face was white under the brick red
tan.

“I don’t have to do much
thinkin’.” He kept his voice low and stony. “You made me
promise I wouldn’t ride at the War Bonnet. You said if I rode
there, I’d ride at the Stampede and I’d keep on. You said we’d
never get back to the Blue Mountains if I did that. Well, I get the
drift now.”

Big Jim Farnol turned abruptly and
strode toward the park gate. If he had stayed there at the chute
another moment he would either have killed Lambrech or he would have
been as completely in love with Eloise Mason as he had ever been.

She had made him promise to quit the
shows after the Jackson rodeo. He had already mailed the letter that
would withdraw his entry papers at the War Bonnet. He had turned that
show over to Pierce Lambrech.

He wouldn’t have believed that
Lambrech was playing a crooked game unless he had heard him admit it
himself. Lambrech had made a mistake once when he had doped a horse
at Pendleton, and Jim had saved him from it. He would never make a
first class bronc peeler, but Jim had trusted him. He had trusted
Eloise, too.

He went to the hotel. No one spoke
to him when he passed through the smoke heavy lobby. He could
understand that, then. Those men thought that he had sold out and
deliberately thrown away his chances of taking first money.

A man might have bad luck at one
show; that was not uncommon. But to lose out twice after reaching the
finals, when betting was top-heavy for him, looked suspicious at
least. He couldn’t blame the men, buckeroos, ropers, and
bulldoggers there at the hotel, for what they thought.

He would even the score at the
promised War Bonnet, though. He promised himself that. He had
promised Eloise he wouldn’t ride again, but he would break that
promise. He would break Pierce Lambrech and Whitely Long, and the
gambler Steymer and their betting ring if he had to top backers the
rest of his life.

He kicked open the door of his room
went in and let his body sag into a chair.

Hardness had been ground into Jim
Farnol as long as he could remember. His father had staked out a dry
farm claim in the Blue Mountains. Jim couldn’t remember his mother.
Until he was fourteen, he had worked on the claim and carried a gun
because dryfarmers were unpopular in the Blues.

He had been fourteen when his father
had been killed in a runaway, and Jim had saddled his cayuse horse
and left the mountains. He didn’t like to think of the next few
years, knocking about from one cow camp to the next. His muscles
weren’t filled out and solid then, and he had taken a lot of
beatings. After that he took to bronc riding in the rodeos.

At twenty-six he had a name for
himself. Most riders agreed that year he would ride to world
championship at Madison Square if his luck wasn’t all bad. That
hadn’t mattered much though when Eloise had asked him to withdraw
from the War Bonnet show.

A hand tapped on the door, and he
jerked the door open. Eloise stood outside. Her eyes met his levelly.

She came in without his asking her.
He left the door open and followed her into the room.

“What do you want?” he demanded.

She sat down. The wistfulness was
almost gone from her face and determination had replaced it. Her lips
were pressed firmly together until she spoke. Then he noticed that
they trembled a little.

“Don’t ride at the War Bonnet
show Jim,” she whispered. “It won’t be Pierce Lambrech you will
break. It will be you.”

“Meanin’?”

“Jim, I’m not asking you
to—trust, me any more. If you don’t think you can, then you
can’t. They’ve been putting a quarter of the money they made
betting in the bank in your name. In case anything goes wrong,
they’ll make it look as though you’re the one who framed the
shows.”

“I suppose Pierce Lambrech told
you that.” Jim’s voice was as sharp as a knife edge.

She nodded without answering for a
moment. “I knew what was happening for a long time. I thought—I
thought you were doing it.”

Jim picked up his hat from the bed.
He rolled a cigarette, jabbed it into his mouth and gulped smoke into
his lungs while he studied the girl.

“I’m going down to the telegraph
office and send a wire to the War Bonnet rodeo committee,” he told
her finally. “I don’t know just how you’re in this. If you’re
in love with Lambrech, I hate to break him, but there’s times a man
has to do things he hates like the devil to do.”

She stood close to him for a moment.
Her fingers rested on his arm. “Jim,” she said, very low, “I
don’t love Pierce Lambrech. Whatever else you believe, I want you
to believe that.”

She followed him downstairs to the
lobby. There were men lounging about the desk. One of them laughed
when he saw Eloise. He whispered something to the other men, and they
grinned smugly.

Jim turned toward them. His face did
not change expression, and his arms dangled straight at his sides.
But he might have had smallpox the way they melted out of the room.
He did not look at Eloise when he pushed out of the door and turned
down the street toward the telegraph office.

His boot heels made steady clicking
sounds on the board sidewalk. Men stepped out of his way and turned
to look at him when he passed.

He could be framed the way Eloise
had told him Pierce Lambrech was doing. If he took the War Bonnet
show, Lambrech would demand the rodeo committee to investigate the
shows he had lost. There would be trouble, and when that was over, he
would find himself disqualified by the association, barred from ever
riding in another show.

Eloise would be dragged into the
committee’s investigation too. Wherever shows were held, men would
know about the girl who had broken Big Jim Farnol.

He could turn back to the hotel
then. Eloise had said she didn’t love Pierce Lambrech. He couldn’t
understand why she had gotten mixed up with Lambrech’s crowd, but
Jim and she could leave then and go back to the Blue Mountains.

He almost turned back when he
reached the telegraph office. If he sent the wire he intended to
send, he might be losing the only girl he had ever cared for. He
would be laying himself open to whatever charge Lambrech wanted to
bring against him.

But if he quit the shows then, there
would always be the suspicion that Big Jim Farnol had quit because he
was crooked and didn’t dare to face exposure. Down at the War
Bonnet there were men who were depending on him to ride, ranchers who
were his friends and would back him with every dollar they had.

He had already registered, and his
registration would be posted. His letter of withdrawal wouldn’t
reach the committee until the show began. He knew how the betting
would be over there on the Snake in Idaho. Lambrech and Steymer would
be taking all the money they could get laid on Jim Farnol.

Jim’s fingers were nerveless when
he scribbled a telegram, left it with the agent to file, and paid for
it. He had known what he had to do, and he had done it. Whatever else
happened after that, he would at least know in his own mind that he
hadn’t turned loose from his stirrups when the fighting got tough.

The rodeo crowd already filled the
town when Jim arrived the night before the show began. Hotels were
overflowing. There were tents and chuck wagon camps along the river.
There were whole outfits from Wyoming and Montana down to see the
three-day War Bonnet show.

Jim could not feel the same
fellowship toward the crowd that he had in other years. The year
before, Eloise had been with him when he had jostled his way from the
livery stable to the rodeo headquarters to verify his entry papers.
Now he missed her excited laughter at the crowd that the names on the
entry sheets had drawn.

When he went into the rodeo
headquarters, the clerk nodded to him. The nod wasn’t friendly.
Decidedly it wasn’t.

“I think the chief wants to see
you, Jim,” He took his cigar out of his mouth just long enough to
speak, and he didn’t offer to shake hands. “You can sign the
papers when you’re through talking to him.”

Big Jim Farnol’s face was
impassive when he strode into the back room where the head of the
rodeo committee had his desk. He nodded to the committee head and
waited.

Doc Chandler, the committee head,
was an old man with eyes that seemed to bristle out of his face. The
War Bonnet show was his one pride. It was an honest show, and he kept
it that way.

He unhooked the gold toothpick from
his watch chain and tapped a stack of papers in front of him with it.

“Jim,” his voice boomed dryly
through the narrow room. “There’s been some talk about your
ridin’ this summer, so I got reports on you from Billings and
Jackson. I got some bank reports on you here, too. They look bad.”

Big Jim Farnol pulled a chair up to
the desk and rolled himself a cigarette. “Do they look bad enough
to bar me?” he asked almost indifferently.

Doc Chandler shook his massive head.
“That’s up to you, Jim. It all depends on this show. I’m goin’
to get to the bottom of this, and the association will get my report.
It’s goin’ to hurt somebody, and that somebody might be you.’’

Jim studied the older man’s face
before he answered. “You mean,” he spoke evenly, “that if I
don’t take the War Bonnet or if there’s anything looks funny
about my riding, I’ll be barred. If I do take it, you figure on
findin’ out why I didn’t take those other two?”

Doc Chandler nodded. “That’s
about it. There’s talk about a girl bein’ mixed up in this. If
you’ve been framed, I’ll give you a chance to prove it. If you
haven’t, the best thing I can tell you to do is to get out of town,
and stay out.”

“Thanks,” Jim picked up his hat.
He stopped in the doorway.

“Doc,” he said, “you’ve seen
a lot of names as big as mine, so maybe you’ll understand this. I
don’t need the money there is in the shows. Me and that girl you
mentioned could leave here tonight and you could bar both of us from
ever signing for another show, but that’s all you could do.

“On the other hand, though, Doc, I
don’t reckon we’d make much of a go of it if folks figured we was
both crooked and if each of us kind of doubted the other one. I guess
we’ll just let this hand ride as it’s dealt right now.”

The rodeo park was crowded even on
the opening day. People knew that any show Doc Chandler ran would be
honest, or as near honest as any men could make a show. Horses would
go high and the rider who took first money would be the rider who
topped them.

He saw Eloise when she stunted her
horse in front of the grandstands. He didn’t go over and hold her
stirrup for her as he usually did before she mounted. The less they
saw of each other until the show was over, the better it was likely
to be for both of them.

She took the fire jump that most men
in the rodeo business would have avoided. He wondered how a girl with
the courage she had would get herself mixed into anything like
framing shows. Something was pretty much wrong there.

Jim rode twice that day, and his
luck was bad both times. He drew easy horses. They were horses that
bucked straight, and any man who could stay in a saddle could ride.
Each time when he rode back to the chutes with the pick up men he was
cursing under his breath.

A man had to have worse horses than
that to ride if he took the War Bonnet show, and Jim Farnol was not
even sure he wanted to take that show.

He wondered where the committee
investigation would lead if he took the show. He knew where it would
lead if he didn’t.

It was after the final event and the
crowds were leaving the stands that he saw Eloise pushing toward him
through the ropers and “doggers” who clustered around the chutes.
There were white spots in her cheeks, and her eyes were puzzled and
angry at the same time.

“Jim,” she accused him. “Are
you trying to throw this show? That last ride you almost pulled
leather, and the horse wasn’t bucking either. If you are—”

He slowly unstrapped his kidney
belt. “If I am, would it matter much?”

“Yes.” For a moment he had
thought she wasn’t going to answer. “Maybe some time you’ll
believe me when I tell you why I was mixed up with Lambrech. But I
couldn’t believe you if you threw a show. You’ve always ridden
high, and I want you to do that now. Do it for me.”

His hand dropped onto hers. “Girl,
you’re talkin’ straight with me, and I’ll give you the same
kind of talk. I don’t care why you got into that deal. We’re
goin’ to bust this show no matter who it hits. If I’m throwed,
it’ll be by a horse I can’t ride.”

The unpredictable luck of drawing
vicious horses that goes with all rodeos changed for Jim Farnol next
day. His horse was a broom-tailed bay that had cockle burrs in its
mane and hell in its heart.

The bay bucked with a twisting lunge
that snapped him back against the cantle of the saddle with each
twist. Jim fought as viciously as the horse fought. He was riding
high, and he knew it. The old Jim Farnol was back in the saddle.

No matter what the outcome of the
show was, Eloise wanted him to take it. No matter who was
disqualified, no matter what people thought wherever rodeos were
held, they would know they had played the game straight. That was
what counted.

When the pick up men closed in, Big
Jim Farnol waved them back. He kicked loose from his stirrups and let
the horse buck out from under him. That was Jim’s way. He could
hear the roar of the crowd beating on his ears. They weren’t
talking about his throwing shows then.

He saw Pierce Lambrech watching him
from one of the chutes, and Jim tipped back his head and laughed.
Lambrech might be a gambler and glory-buster, but he wasn’t a
buckeroo.

The crowd was whooping it up, and
the whole town was roaring with shouting men when a bartender pulled
Jim to one side and motioned to a back room. Jim nodded slowly. He
knew what that meant. He had ridden to the finals that day, and
Steymer and Lambrech were worried.

Jim nodded to the men around the
poker table in the back room. Lambrech was there, as sullen and as
pale as usual. Whitey Long, the roper, straddled a chair and watched
Jim through shifty eyes.

Steymer leaned back from the table.
He was oily, with a pudgy face and long slender hands. He, had a
sheaf of bills on the table in front of him, and he ran his fingers
through them idly.

“There’s two thousand dollars
here, Farnol.” His voice held no expression. “It’s yours if you
leave town tonight. If you don’t, when the committee investigates,
that girl will be in it as well as us—and you.”

A crooked grin spread over Jim
Farnol’s battered face. “It’s no good, Steymer. I just got the
judges’ report. I’m ridin’ in the finals tomorrow, and so is
Lambrech there. A lot might depend on luck, but I don’t think so.”

Steymer grunted up from the chair,
and his hand unconsciously slipped into his coat. Jim’s hand met
his puffy face and shoved him back.

“I wouldn’t do it,” Jim
warned. “I suppose you know I could strew you all over this room,
but I’m goin’ to hit you where it hurts. Right in the middle of
that money you’ve got bet on framing this show.”

He didn’t wait for Steymer to
reply when he left the room. When Jim had left, Steymer turned to
Lambrech. There was a dangerous softness in the gambler’s voice.

“You damn’ sucker, you thought
that girl wanted you instead of Farnol. She knew something was wrong,
and she played you to find out what. Want to know who tipped off
Chandler and asked for this investigation?

Steymer let his coat sag open until
it showed the shoulder holster under his left arm. “No you won’t.
Farnol isn’t going to ride tomorrow. You and Whitey are going to
hold a little party for him down at the livery barn. Get what I
mean?”

Jim Farnol studied the note the desk
clerk at the hotel handed him next morning. Eloise wanted him to meet
her before the show. Something important had happened. She would wait
for him at the livery stable when she went down to take her horse
out. He turned the paper over slowly in his hands.

At Billings it had been a doped
horse that had beaten him. At Jackson it had been a broken latigo.
Steymer and Lambrech might intend something like that again, and
Eloise had some way found it out. He tucked the note into the pocket
of his Levis and turned down the street toward the livery stable.

The stable was deserted. People were
streaming to the rodeo park, and rigs had already been taken out. The
stable boy did not seem to be around. Jim puzzled. That was peculiar.

Jim called Eloise’s name, and
there was no answer. The stable was dark inside. He could see the
empty stalls where horses had stood the night before. Eloise kept her
big white gelding in a stall in the rear. He whistled to himself
while he walked down the dark alleyway toward the stall.

He stopped suddenly. The horse was
gone. There was no one waiting there in the stall. He heard a noise
behind him and whirled. The snaky coil of a lariat dropped over his
shoulders.

Things seemed to happen at once
then. A man dissolved out of the stall close to where Jim was
standing, and Jim caught the blue sheen of a gun barrel. He threw
himself at the man, and the rope around his arms jerked him back.

He saw the gun barrel swing up and
arc down. He tried to twist to avoid the blow, and the gun cracked
down on his head.

Through a blurr of sounds and lights
he heard Lambrech’s voice. “All right, Whitey, work him over.”

Jim couldn’t move for the rope
that was wrapped around his body. He felt a boot crash into his ribs
while he fought for consciousness. There was no pain. His mind was
too numb for that. The boot rose and fell again. He couldn’t keep
track of the number of times.

Without knowing how he knew it, he
knew what would happen. Lambrech and Whitey would leave him in a
stall where there was a horse. When he was found, people would think
he had been trampled by the horse. They wouldn’t tie him. They
would make sure he was unconscious and let the horse do the rest.

He fought to get the fog out of his
mind, and it grew deeper. He could hear voices without associating
them with men. He could feel a dull ache in his chest and then he
couldn’t feel or hear anything.

The next thing he knew, water was
sloshing over him, and he looked up into the white, scared face of
the stable boy.

It took him minutes to get his
muscles and breathing coordinated so that he could speak.

“Lord, Mr. Jim,” the stable boy
kept saying over to himself. “That blue horse sure did tromp you. I
knowed I shouldn’t go out to the show even when them fellers give
me a ticket. That’s why I come back early.”

“Shut up,” Jim’s voice sounded
wrong. He could feel the pain in his chest then, the gouging tearing
sort of pain that means broken ribs. “Get a horse. I got to get out
there, boy.”

The stable boy shook his head. “The
show’s most over. They’ll be ridin’ for top money pretty quick
now. I’ll fetch a doctor.”

Jim didn’t object when the boy
scampered out of the stable. He didn’t have time to argue. That
would be the quickest way.

He never knew how he got the blue
roan that had trampled him saddled. The latigoes were like strips of
iron in his hands. He had to brace himself against the horse and drag
his body into the saddle.

He hadn’t been on hand for the
drawing, but he knew his horse would be in the chute waiting for him.
He wouldn’t be disqualified if he was at the park when he was
called to ride. If he wasn’t though—He didn’t think about that.

One part of his mind kept saying
that a T Rodeo Fool 9 man couldn’t ride with broken ribs. Every
sway of the cow pony he was riding seemed to wrench his body in two.
That would be only a sample of what a bucker could do. He couldn’t
stay in the saddle one jump.

The other part of his mind kept
telling him he had to ride. He knew what would happen if he didn’t.
He might not know why Eloise had ever joined in with Lambrech, but he
could see the results. If he didn’t ride, when the investigation
came, he and Eloise would be the ones who would face it.

The rodeo park was a blur in Big Jim
Farnol’s memory. He knew he was at the chute when his name was
called from the announcer’s box. He saw faces without knowing or
caring who they belonged to.

He saw a rodeo judge coming toward
him and saying, “This man is no shape to ride. Then he remembered
driving his fist into the judge’s face when that man tried to keep
him from climbing the mounting chute.

Then he was on the mounting chute
and looking at the horse underneath him. He didn’t need eyes to
know that that horse would buck.

It was a big sorrel animal with a
square head and cropped ears. The horse was short through the back
and thick through the chest. Even though it was blindfolded it fought
when chute men tightened the cinches.

As something disassociated from
everything else he saw Pierce Lambrech coming across the rodeo park
toward him. He saw Eloise talking to the judge he had knocked down
and saw them both start toward Lambrech.

Then he was in the saddle and
shouting for the gate to be swung open.

Big Jim Farnol tipped back his head
and waved to the crowd when the sorrel gelding mucked clear of the
chute. He was making his last ride, and he knew it.

He didn’t need a doctor to tell
him that he would never ride another bucker. He didn’t need anyone
to tell him that he ran the risk of never riding anything again.

That was his last show. Whether he
quit rodeos because he was barred by the association or whether he
quit with men still calling him a top buckeroo depended on that ride.

The sorrel seemed to explode beneath
him. He felt the horse sunfish, and he took the slash of the cantle
in his back when his body twisted with the horse. It jarred him, and
it left him fighting to keep his feet in the stirrups.

The sorrel was wily. He stopped
dead, then spun and plunged. Jim Farnol was ready for that. He had
ridden buckers too long not to know their tricks. The sorrel reared
and pivoted on its hand feet.

Nine men out of ten would have
turned loose from the saddle then. If a horse goes over backward, a
rider has no chance to keep the weight of the horse from crushing
him. Jim fought at the sorrel’s head. The horse seemed to shiver
then to go over on its side.

Jim turned loose from one stirrup
then. Everything seemed to be slipping about him. He couldn’t get
into the saddle again and come up riding, but he had to if he rode
that sorrel. A reride wouldn’t help him. That sorrel was his last
rodeo horse.

The crowd, the horse, everything
dissolved into a blur of dust and noise. Jim wasn’t on the horse
any longer, but on the ground and a pickup man was helping him back
to the chutes.

Jim shook his head. He tried to make
his voice sound casual as though he didn’t care. It was hard to do.

“Well,” he heard himself saying.
“I guess that’s finished me for a buckeroo. I just couldn’t
stay with that cayuse, but people ain’t apt to believe that.”

The pickup man stopped. “Are you
clean loco? You stayed twelve jumps and nobody could get near you.
Man, you rode that sorrel till all the jump was out of him. Say-y,
you B Fighting Western 10 don’t mean you was out cold in the
saddle, do you? I’ve heard of it, but I ain’t seen it before.
Lord a’mighty, man, people’ll remember that ride as long as
there’s shows.”

Jim grinned when he saw Eloise
bending over him back at the chute.

“I had to know, Jim,” he could
hear her tell him. “I thought at first—that you were framing
shows. That’s why I joined in with Lambrech—to find out. That’s
why I asked Doc Chandler to investigate. Don’t you see, Jim, I
couldn’t marry a man I didn’t trust.”

Doc Chandler’s dry old voice cut
in from somewhere behind them. “Couldn’t make a charge against
Big Jim hold water now. Reckon we’ll just float those three rannies
out of town, though, when the boys get through collecting the bets
that was laid out. They’ll darn near have to sell their shirts to
pay up, and the way the town’s feelin’, it ain’t healthy for
them not to pay.”

“Yell?” Jim wasn’t listening.
“Do you know, girl,” he told Eloise. “All the time that sorrel
bucked, I could see them old Blues gettin’ closer. I could sort of
see a valley, out there with dogie cattle in it, and a few broomtail
cayuses. It sort of seemed like we was there, too, and had our brand
on those things. Do you reckon maybe that sorrel knowed he was
buckin’ me into everything a man could ever want?”